Final report available on cIRcle

Hey there!

Long time, no post. We were all so wrapped up in graduating and moving onto to new things that we forgot to post the link to our final report.

You can find our finished product, Commercial Shipping Noise Impacts on the Critical Habitat of the Southern Resident Killer Whale (Orcinus orca), HERE.

Poster and presentation: done and done!

It’s been a while since we’ve posted an update. Since last time, we’ve had a great MURC presenting experience, have presented our research poster to the EOSC faculty, and have been making strides on our final report.

Check out our poster below (it should be readable if you click on it):

Stay tuned for the release of our report! We’ll post a pdf here and it will be available on UBC’s cIRcle site.

Come see us present at MURC!!

Our team has been accepted to present at the Multidisciplinary Undergraduate Research Conference (MURC)! Come see us talk about shipping noise impacts on BC’s Southern Resident killer whales. All you need to do is register here!

See you there!

Ship noise impacts on SR killer whales

After long hours spent in the GIS lab and library playing with our data and poring over literature, we’ve decided to focus our research on shipping noise impacts on killer whales. More specifically, we’re now looking at the noise impacts that various commercial ship types, going at various speeds, have on BC’s southern resident (SR) killer whale population. Through our literature scour, we’ve found that, broadly:

• ship noise from large container ships falls in the low frequency range (10 – 500 Hz), the same range employed by killer whales (Hildebrand, 2009; Hatch, 2007).
• low frequency noise pollution impacts killer whales by impairing their ability to communicate with the rest of the population; to sense their environmental surroundings; and to use their echolocation systems to track and sense prey (Hildebrand, 2009; Erbe, 2002; Mazzuca 2001) .
• Ship noise impacts on whales roughly increase with ship size and speed (Hildebrand, 2009).

To give you sense of where we’re at currently, we’ve attached a couple of images. Below is one of the images we made during one of our GIS lab adventures that shows the speed distribution of ships coming in and out BC ports around the southern point of Vancouver Island.

Above, red shows upper limit speeds (roughly around 20 knots and higher). Yellow shows mid range speeds (roughly around 10 knots) and blue illustrates lowest speed (roughly around 0 - 10 knots).

Below, we’ve  plotted container shipping routes for one month with 3 years worth of whale distribution to illustrate where container ships come into contact with  whale habitat.

killer whale distribution (2008 - 2010) and shipping traffic (August 2008).

Our next steps are identifying categories for the container ships according to size and noise level emitted; figuring out the precise noise range affecting the SR killer whale population; and determining the critical speeds of ships in various categories for negative influence on the SR killer whale population.

Works cited

Erbe, C. (2002). Underwater noise of whale-watching boats and potential effects on killer whale (Orcinus orca), based on an acoustic impact model. Marine Mammal Science 18: 394-418.

Hatch, L., Clark, C., Merrick, R., Van Parijs, S., Ponirakis, D., Schwer, K., Thompson, M., and Wiley D. (2007). Characterizing the relative contributions of large vessels to total ocean noise fields: A case study using the Gerry E. Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Environmental Management 42: 735 – 752.

Hildebrand, J.A. (2009).  Anthropogenic and Natural Sources of Ambient Noise in the Ocean. Marine Ecology Pregress Series 395: 5 – 10.

Mazzuca, L.L. (2001). Potential Effects of Low Frequency Sound (LFS) from Commercial Vessels on Large Whales. University of Washington, Thesis.

Update from the GIS lab

One of our beautiful ArcGIS shipping path charts.

Our team has just emerged from an arduous and anguishing two weeks in the UBC Keorner Library GIS lab. The sheer size of the data files we’re working with has been causing us endless pain – especially since our memory stick and Google doc. storage has not been very helpful in keeping our processed data safe and sound. But we’ve been forging ahead and should have some exciting* results to show you all soon!

Happy 2011!

-Whales&Ships team

*fingers crossed.

CBC: “B.C. orcas not adequately protected: court”

CBC photo

BC killer whales are in the news! A CBC article from Dec. 7:

More than 300 at-risk killer whales living in British Columbia waters year-round haven’t been adequately protected by Ottawa, a federal court judge has ruled.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has “acted unlawfully” by failing to implement sufficient measures to safeguard the whales’ critical habitat, Justice Russell Goodwin ruled Tuesday.

The lawsuit was brought by a coalition of nine environmental groups, including Greenpeace, the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecojustice, the Sierra Club and the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

“The government is the one who’s supposed to be monitoring best practices towards the environment,” Stephanie Goodwin, B.C. director of Greenpeace, said after the ruling.

“But what we’re learning is without independent assessors or auditors or even independent watchdogs … killer whales and their habitat aren’t being protected, even though on paper the Canadian government says it is happening.”

The environmental and wildlife groups argued that Fisheries and Oceans flouted laws outlined in the Species at Risk Act, which requires the department to protect identified critical habitats of endangered and threatened species from destruction.

Justice Russell agreed, ruling the federal government failed to prevent significant threats to the habitat, such as toxic contamination and noise pollution. It also failed to protect the declining wild salmon stocks, the prey the whales depend on, he said.

Research Proposal: Submitted!

Southern Resident Killer Whale Critical Habitat in BC (Fisheries & Oceans Canada 2008).

It’s the end of term 1 and we’ve sent our research proposal to our supervisors for feedback and gotten in touch with some great contacts including individuals from Port Metro Vancouver, Transport Canada, The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and UBC’s Marine Mammal Research Unit. We are feeling more confident about the direction our project seems to be going and are excited to get into some intense data analysis come January.

Here’s our proposal abstract:

Economic development and expansion in British Columbia and Canada has led to an increase in container ship traffic on the west coast of Canada. This coast is also home to the populations of Northern and Southern Resident killer whales (Orcinus orca) who are threatened and endangered respectively (SARA, 2010). With further development and expansion of several BC ports, shipping traffic will increase in critical killer whale habitat, which may lead to increased sound disturbance impacting the  populations. Our research project will, through GIS analysis, compare past, present and potential future increases in shipping traffic to the presence and density of killer whales. In doing so, we hope to identify areas where ship traffic has the greatest impact on the killer whale populations, potentially leading to behavioural changes. The results of our study could contribute to a management plan to mitigate any negative interactions ships have with killer whales.

 

Project Update

Shipping traffic density, from Ministry of Environment

Data Collection:

Currently, we are in the process of applying for data from Wild Whales which will give us information on whale movements within the waters surrounding Vancouver Island. We have received ship traffic data from Marine Communications and Traffic Services (MCTS) – a division of the Canadian Coast Guard – and are currently mapping this data in GIS.

Modeling/Mapping

Our plan is to use GIS to analyze the probability of killer whale interactions with shipping traffic and to make projections and comparisons between pre-T2 construction and post-T2 construction, as well as Prince Rupert port expansions.

We are in the process of identifying:

• What models/factors we will use, modify, combine
• Who will can help us with modeling
• How we will make comparisons between pre-T2 construction and post-T2 construction
• How we could analyze the difference in impacts between expanding the Port of Prince Rupert instead.

Other impacts of Port Expansions, Increased container ship traffic:

We are discussing ways in which we can:

• Link the whale impacts to salmon populations
• Assess outcomes of increased ship traffic (ex. If our model predicts increased whale ship interactions will this cause the whales to choose not to occupy the Strait of Georgia and Jaun De Fuca Strait?)
• Assess secondary outcomes of whale population impacts (ex. What will be the implications on local food webs, First Nations culture, BC tourism?)
• Study the environmental/biological impact of port expansion at different stages: 1. during construction, 2. post-construction, 3. projection of negative effects after 20-30 years (and perhaps the different effects on each trophic level at each stage).

A new ENVR400 research project

Hey there!

The intent of this blog is to track the progress of a UBC environmental science project focused on Orca population interactions with ship traffic in BC.